A more-than-slightly-subversive blog, dedicated to serving project leaders with attitude.

24 March 2010

Overvaluing Complexity

One of my frequent refrains is that technologists have a tendency to overvalue complexity. Complexity looks like work. Complexity looks like improvement. I wrote The Simplicity Cycle book to help counter that tendency, arguing that simplicity is a sign of design maturity, while complexity is a sign of cluttered thinking and immature design.

This is not just a problem in the military. Industry certainly wrestles with overvaluing complexity, as the following video shows (incidentally, the video was actually produced by Microsoft, as an internal parody intended to highlight their own foibles - and somehow, it got unleashed onto the interweb and we all got to join in the laugh).